So, you've decided to join the true PC Gaming Master Race and get 3Dvision. Nice one! Once you've experienced the exquisite immersion that comes from gaming in proper 3D, you'll find it hard to ever go back. But 3Dvision comes with a performance cost, and you're wondering how your PC will handle it. How much 3Dvision affects your FPS varies game by game, but there are some rules of thumb.

Putting the Rules of Thumb to the test

In 3Dvision, the GPU needs to pump out twice the frames as in 2D (one for each eye). Based on this, 3Dvision users sometimes make two claims:

Claim #1: Turning on 3Dvision in a game will generally halve the FPS

Claim #2: 3Dvision and SLI are a match made in heaven, since the former requires two [similar] frames per eye, and the latter gives you two [similar] GPUs with which to render them.

Intuitively, these claims sound fair enough, but I decided to do some testing and find out for sure.

I focused only on average framerates. I took note of maximum and minimum framerates too, but the story they told didn't deviate much from the one told by the average framerate results, so I left them out, for the sake of clarity

I did between 3 and 5 passes for each test, depending on how satisfied I was that I was getting a trustworthy sampling (for example, Mafia II is notoriously variable, and therefore requires a larger test sample than Tomb Raider, which tends to give almost the exact same results each time)

For the 2D tests, I disabled the 3Dvision driver completely (ie. I didn't merely press Ctrl-T)

How I present the results

I first present each game's FPS graph.

Then I collate the data from the FPS graph in two slightly different ways, and put those into a blue boxand a green box.

The blue box reveals how much of a benefit adding a second card (ie. SLI) made, both in a 2D scenario and a 3D scenario. This puts ﻿claim #2﻿to the test (is SLI really much more effective in 3D than it is in 2D?)

The green boxreveals how much of a performance drop I saw once 3Dvision was turned on. This puts claim #1 to the test (does 3D really halve the framerate compared to 2D?)

The results

OK, lets jump right into the test results.

Not bad! Even though SLI brings a pretty dismal 18% improvement in 2D*, SLI scaling is much better in 3D - more than three times better, in fact. Claim #2 is looking pretty good.

Meanwhile, claim #1 seems pretty much on the money, unfortunately. Turning on 3Dvision in a single-GPU environment gives us a whopping 45% decrease in FPS. Not quite a halving of framerate, but close. It's better in SLI, of course, and an SLI user who switched to 3Dvision would only suffer a 26% decrease in FPS - from 78 to 57 - despite the fact that the GPUs would be still be rendering twice as many frames.

* As I showed in a previous article, SLI users may actually get a higher FPS in Batman Arkham Origins by disabling SLI and devoting their second card to PhysX.

I tested Tomb Raider with all settings set to max, except for SSAA, which was set to x2 rather than x4.

Unfortunately, Tomb Raider tells us a different story to Arkham Origins. While SLI scaling is beautiful in 2D, it's not as impressive in 3D (ironically, since it's again 59%). The single-GPU performance cost is again about 50%.

Here, we see not much difference between SLI and single-GPU. By the way, please note that I used the Helixmod fix for Bioshock Infinite for this test. I did not use Nvidia's "3D compatibility mode", which may have a different performance impact.

Ok, let's see some more charts.

OK, a fairly varied bunch of results there. Mafia II was reminiscent of Arkham Origins, with paltry SLI scaling in 2D but a handsome improvement in 3D. In fact, SLI scaling was better in 3D in every game except Tomb Raider. But only two games (Sleeping Dogs and Metro: Last Light) really did justice to the "SLI and 3Dvision are a match made in heaven" maxim of ﻿claim #2﻿, with almost perfect SLI scaling in 3D (ie. almost a doubling of FPS).

Let's average it all out

OK, let's take the results of all 8 games, average them out, and see what we find:

Looking at the green box, we see that claim #1 is spot on: Switching to 3Dvision mode will tend to halve your framerate. This is mitigated somewhat with a second card, with 3Dvision's superior SLI usage narrowing the gap.

3Dvision's advantage in SLI is clear (47% vs 66%), though not as massive as ﻿claim #2﻿ would have you believe. More to the point, it's somewhat unpredictable. Sometimes it vastly outshines 2D SLI (eg. Batman, Metro, Mafia II), while other times it has only a modest improvement (eg. Hitman, Bioshock). And in at least in one case (Tomb Raider), 3D SLI distinctly underperformed compared to its 2D counterpart.

One thing all 8 tests agree on though, is that when gaming in 3Dvision, SLI will always be significantly worth it. While 2D SLI gave only a 18% improvement in Arkham Origins, and 4% in Mafia II, 3D SLI scored at least 49% in every single test. A match made in heaven? Well, maybe not quite. But a good match, for sure.

So, is 3Dvision worth it?

Yes, yes, and yes. 3D makes games come alive like you've never seen them before. Objects become more lifelike, spaces become more cavernous, and the gameworld feels less cramped; hidden details emerge, and immersion goes through the roof.

However you choose to deal with the performance cost - whether by lowering graphical settings, forking out for stronger hardware, or just putting up with lower framerates - it will be worth it, as it'll still look better in 3D than it ever did in 2D.

And as these tests indicate, for those 3Dvision users considering an upgrade, SLI may not be a panacea, but it's still clearly a great bang-for-buck prospect.

Dave Bleja

Dave is a graphics professional and longtime PC power-user. He spends more on his gaming rig than a reasonable person should. He founded the indie game studio Volnaiskra, and is the creative force behind Spryke.

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Quite a few people swear by 3Dvision surround, though most seem to agree that top-end cards in SLI are a must. In some recent games, I believe even 780ti SLI won't get you anywhere near 60fps unless you turn the settings way down.

I haven't tried 3D surround myself, and I don't think I will, because I really value a smooth framerate. For me, I think the immersion gained by the surround would be outweighed by the immersion lost by the low/choppy framerate. But like I said, some people swear by it.

Some of the regulars at the nvidia 3dvision forum are 3Dsurround users, so you could get more detailed info there: https://forums.geforce.com/default/board/49/3d-vision/

James

9/8/2014 08:27:45 pm

Unrelated to 3D gaming. I'd be really interested in seeing the extreme hi and low FPS list you kept.

Just to say I am now owning a 1440p swift with 2 gtx 970 stryx. I can play anything on ultra at 1440p but even then I prefer 1080p 3d to 1440p 2d. Even its it is really cool, i feel something is missing. For me. 3d is so immersive and properly tweak (helixblog patch) games are wow on my vg278h.

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LocutusEstBorg

4/20/2015 08:57:41 pm

I think there's something wrong with your rig. I have a single 780 Ti and my 3D Vision performance at 1920x1080 is nowhere near as bad. I get a stable 60 fps in most of those games where you're getting 20-30 fps (Sleeping Dogs, Mafia II, Grid, Tomb Raider)!

Hell those games are ancient! I played them on my 580 and got 40 fps in 3D!

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Dave

4/21/2015 03:34:23 am

Remember that I'm using built in benchmarks, which in some cases are more demanding than average gameplay. Also, I'm using absolute max settings, including in-game supersampling where available, as well as transparency supersampling in the nvidia control panel.

If you try the built-in benchmarks with all those settings maxed, and still get wildly different results, then please let me know.

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jesse

7/27/2015 03:16:33 pm

hey mate, cool review. I would try tomb raider again with "max pre-rendered frames as "let the application decide". My sli 780ti setup is silky smooth in tomb raider in 3d. its one of the best 3d games I've played. I Tried changing that setting as ive seen a few people mention it, and it ran slow and stuttery. Set it back and its smooth as butter again, eg 60fps min, 60fps max in benchmark 3d. in 2d i get min 200fps max 334 and average 261FPS. all settings maxed, hair normal. 3d is perfectly smooth in all games for me. But I'm only on 1080p monitor, so my sli 780ti sc setup is never stressed. hope this helps you. I couldnt play with the fps you listed, you must be on a 4k monitor or something otherwise.